Optimal impulsive control for advertising strategy problems based on a gradient

This paper considers an optimal advertising strategy problem. This is an important problem in marketing investment for new products in a free market. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, the problem is formulated as an optimal control problem of switched impulsive systems with the state inequality constraints, which is different from the existing nonlinear system models. As the complexity of such constraints and the switching instants are unknown, it is difficult to solve this problem by using conventional optimization techniques. To overcome this difficulty, by applying the penalty function, all the state inequality constraints are first written as non-differentiable penalty terms and imposed into the cost function. Then, the penalty terms are smoothed by using a novel smooth function, leading to a smooth optimal control problem with no state inequality constraints, and an improved gradient-based particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed for solving this problem. Error analysis results show that if the adjustable parameter is sufficiently small, the solution of the smooth optimal control problem is approximately equal to the original problem. Finally, a switched impulsive system for beer sales is established to illustrate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm